ZeroDrift raised $10 million to protect the AI model from itself.

While companies fix errors in their AI systems, governance has become a key challenge. Some follow a dual approach: a model for processing incoming requests and another to prevent the first model from getting into trouble.

This is the premise of ZeroDrift, a new AI compliance service announced on Tuesday that it has collected 10 million US dollars in a seed financing round, including a16z Speedrun, Reign Ventures, PitchDrive Ventures and U&I Ventures. The company takes care exclusively of the second part of the system, namely between AI models and end users, to identify and replace all messages that could represent a compliance problem.

It may seem strange to develop an AI tool to correct the errors of other AI systems, but ZeroDrift says that its system has some architectural advantages over the models it will correct. The system is triggered by conventional programs that use known compliance standards such as SOC 2 or GDPR deterministic, and that LLM comes into play only when a message has been marked and a compliant version of the same message rewrites.

“We are able to identify deterministic, what are all regulated areas, what is violated, and then we have LLMs, which can carry out the conversions,” says CEO Kumesh Aroomoogan.

It is crucial that the entire system of the company can be operated with lower latency and higher reliability than a conventional LLM. This is what ZeroDrift as its main advantage over large laboratories like OpenAI and Anthropic which are often already present in the underlying system.

The most obvious application is AI chatbots that are already used before consumers, where fraudulent responses can have serious consequences. But Aroomoogan sees a much larger addressable market that may include AI-generated messages generated only in automated systems that people will never see. To date, this is a relatively small market, but it will grow with the spread of AI.

As can be seen from the donation collection, there is a great need for repeating such products. “It was probably the fastest donation action I’ve ever done in my life,” says Aroomoogan, and praises Andressen Horowitz for having helped structuring the Seed Round. “We have closed within three weeks and will have tripled the amount.”